


your broken edges (fit mine)

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angry Sex, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes-centric, F/M, Getting Together, Healing, Het Sex, Implied Peter Parker/Harley Keener, Nebula (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Not A Fix-It, POV Bucky Barnes, Pansexual Bucky Barnes, Pansexual Character, Past Bucky Barnes/Loki - Freeform, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Endgame, Robotic Nebula
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 15:55:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18920245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: “You should stay away from her,” Steve tells him. “She’s not Loki.”“So youdoknow about that,” Bucky grunts, leans back in the fancy kitchen chair Tony’s woulda killed him for if he broke it. In another time.





	your broken edges (fit mine)

She’s blue, and Bucky is staring. It’s not because she’s blue, not exactly. But because of another blue almost-villain he once knew. 

And because he’s watching her take herself apart and put herself back together, in a way that makes him stroke the plates of his arm.

She is going to murder him; Bucky can see it in her gaze, lonely, guilty, and pained, but he can’t stop staring.

Until she slings a knife at him that he doesn’t know where comes from. It’s only years of ingrained training that allows him to duck out of the way.

He doesn’t miss her shock and he throws her an amused smirk just because. 

\---

Nebula is confident in a way that makes what’s left of the Avengers wary. When they bother to visit the abandoned tower.  She struts around naked, and argues that she can’t really be classified _naked,_ given how much of her _isn’t skin._

Bucky likes it. He’s not a perve, though he definitely appreciates the view. She’s smooth everywhere and gleaming in lots of places, when the light glints off her.

But he mostly likes it because he can see the cracks in her… not-armor. 

He remembers strutting about similarly. “Lady Hyacinth Macaw did it to hide her riches,” he whispers to her one day. 

She looks at him, extremely confused. So does anyone with super hearing who happens to have dropped by.

Bucky shrugs. “Watch a movie, listen to the songs.” 

\---

“You should stay away from her,” Steve tells him. “She’s not Loki.”

“So you _do_ know about that,” Bucky grunts, leans back in the fancy kitchen chair Tony’s woulda killed him for if he broke it. In another time.

Steve gives him a hard look; the look’s edges are dampened by water faded eyes and wrinkles. Still, it’s one of those “I’m about to lecture you ‘50’s style,” looks and Bucky shrugs.  “I like what I like, Steve.”

“Yeah? And what’s that?” Steve demands.

Bucky tilts his head. Way back, before the world, _his world,_ expanded. Bucky liked… what he liked. Male, female. Neither. Both.

There weren’t labels or words back then, and he never really thought to ask about it. Think about it. He couldn’t talk about his lovers or preferences anyways, so trying to fit them into boxes never seemed to matter. 

And then Hydra happened, ice-naps happened, the apocalypse happened. The world came crashing back and hasn’t stopped trying to fix itself.

Still, he’s been on the internet. Seen all the words and labels and he just... It’s confusing and he doesn’t care. 

“Like ‘em all, regardless of the bits,” Bucky says. He winks at Steve. 

“Not what I meant, and you know it. I don’t care about _those_ preferences.”

Bucky stands up, metal and flesh fists clenched tight. “What, you wanna know if I like ‘em rough? Who tops? If I’m into the _real_ kinky shit?”

Steve sighs, reaches towards Bucky who twist away from him. “Buck. You don’t always have to go for the ones’ with an edge.” _The ones who’ll hurt you._  

Bucky looks at Steve, really looks at him wrinkles and grey hair and fucking wedding band, and wants to ask “Do you even know me anymore?”

Instead he says, “I left Loki. Partly ‘cause of Thor, yeah, but partly because he just…” _He wasn’t broken the right way._ He leaves Steve to figure it out.

\---

Nebula stalks him into his own room in the compound. Shoves right past the door and Tony’s going to need to fix that too.

Or, well, Bucky isn’t really sure who’s going to fix it these days. The Spider doesn’t come around. Shuri’s cleaning up Wakanda.

Wanda might could do something.

It’s just a door anyway. He lays on musty sheets and pretends to continue reading his book.

“You fucked a demi-god?” She grunts at him. 

“Frost Giant,” Bucky answers, just to be contrary.

“Who topped?” She asks. There’s a challenge in her voice. A fear. Bucky glances over the pages and studies her, wearing tight leather pants and a crop top he thinks used to be Natasha’s. The outfit looks good on her, and it burns in him. He wants to hurt her.

It’s not her fault. He tells her, “Depended on who needed it.” 

Nebula doesn’t say anything for a long time. Just stands in the bent doorway staring at the walls and thinking. 

“Did you…” Bucky starts.

Nebula tries to shrug, but her hip twist funny in the movement, and that’s when he realizes why she’s really here.

“I uh-” Bucky chews the skin around his middle nail. “I ain’t a scientist, you know. Those ones, they’re all…” Gone. In their own way.

“So you’re useless,” she snarls.

She rips the door from the hinges on her way out and Bucky gets a weird feeling in his gut. 

\---

He wasn’t lying when he told her he wasn’t a scientist. Bucky isn’t stupid, not by any long shot. But he’s also never really been the brains of any operation. More the muscle, the back-up. And he’s _liked_ it that way. ‘Cause despite how Steve shone in the limelight, Bucky was always meant to be a shadow.

Probably the one thing Hydra got right, in picking him.

But he’s not stupid and he’s learned a few things here and there, tinkering with motorcycles and his own piece of shit metal arm.

Nebula isn’t earth though, made up of alien skin and cosmic metals. 

“Ow,” she seethes, claws digging into his wrist. He hisses back, yanking away his fleshy wrist, wiping at the blood pearls.

“Bitch,” he says. “Told you I wasn’t a scientist. I’m doin’ my best here, but you keep movin’.”

“I asked you to fix my hip, not send electricity through the whole right side of me,” she says. She sits up, surprisingly graceful for a robot, and swings her legs off the table.

“I haven’t finished attaching that,” Bucky warns her. “Besides you never actually _asked_ anything. I offered.”

“I can do it myself,” she says. One of her fingers lights up like his welding torch and he watches with fascination as she grits her teeth and puts herself back together. It definitely should _not_ make his stomach flip.

“You didn’t even need me!” Bucky accuses. 

Nebula gives him a look, tired and something else. She doesn’t look at him as she quietly tells him, “It’s always easier with someone else.” She limps out, and he can see now, where the bend in the plate is wrong.

She turns back and says, “Plus, we all need someone, even if it’s for nothing,” which distracts him and he forgets to tell her he _can_ fix that.

\---

Nebula eats like she’s feral and half starved. Given the sharp spine and sharper ribs Bucky’s had beneath his hands, he’d believe it. But it’s just the two of them holed up in a dusty, abandoned tower and he lets her know, “No one’s gonna take it from you, and there’s a shit ton more.”

Nebula glances up at him, black eyes doing their freaky glow thing, and she says, “Don’t you have a grandpa to go visit?” Noodles and curry spill out of her mouth, onto her wrist, and she licks it off without any hesitation.

“Saw Steve yesterday,” Bucky grunts. ‘Cause he hates the old folks home. Hates going there to see Steve, wondering which time’ll be the last.

Hates hearing about that perfect goddamned life he lived with Peggy. Hates that he can’t say that out loud. “Don’t you got a sister lost in the galaxy to rescue?”

Nebula throws a sharp object at him, or maybe shoots it out of her wrist- he hasn’t quite sorted that one out.

“My sister died. That thing is an anomaly. An abomination that shouldn’t exist and whatever those ragtag space nuts want to do with her is on them.” She takes her noodles, a carton of rice, and all the eggrolls as she storms out.

She’s not wrong, but Bucky isn’t sorry he poked that wound. Infections are best bled out early anyway.

 ---

The tower shouldn’t be abandoned. Bucky isn’t sure why Captain Falcon America never shows up here. Or why Pepper and Morgan stay hidden in that tree house. He kinda knows why Thor is gone, why Dr. Portals left. Even a little why Bruce found his own place. Wanda went home, wherever that was for her, and Clint had long since been gone. Since long before the world broke and tried to fit its edges back together  

The tower is haunted by three very strong ghost, but there’s still a lot of people who should be here to honor that.

“Everyone mourns their own way, Buck. You gotta give them time. They’ll come around,” Steve tells him. His hands are cold, clammy and shaky, and Bucky bites his tongue until he taste metal so he doesn’t ask, “Like you came around?”

“I think Spider and Harley sometimes sneak in. I think,” he’s not sure how to tell Steve what he caught on the security cameras. Because Steve might be okay with Bucky’s lack of preference, but he’s still _Captain America._ Still got morals left over from the 50’s.

Steve says, “They’re still young. Let them get into a little trouble. They’ll figure it out or their livers and lungs will do it for ‘em.”

And Bucky nods like that’s what it is, drinking. Smoking.

“I don’t really know what to do anymore, Steve. I was never a hero, and with all the old ones retired and the new ones trying to sort out of there’s even a need…” Bucky trails off, fist clenched in the pocket of his jacket.

“So find a girl,” Steve starts, and then adds at Bucky’s flat look, “Or a guy or… whatever. Settle down and just, live a life like we used to dream about.”

Like it’s that simple. Like his jagged edges wouldn’t rip some poor soul apart. But he smiles at Steve and says. “Yeah okay, lemme just head to the library and meet a nice bookkeeper.”

Steve smiles at him, all sad but hopeful, and Bucky thinks he’s gonna be sick from the smell of stale bread and old dying people, so he kisses his friend’s withered cheek and says, “See ya soon pal.”

\---

Nebula struts around naked and she says, “No one is around to see it anyway,” and she’s not entirely wrong. Falcon’s off doing Cap’s job and Harley and Peter are only ever here when their families ask too many questions. 

Wanda doesn’t come around anymore and Bruce blushes his way to the broken lab.

Clint stopped visiting, which doesn’t bother Bucky, but Rhodey checks in once a week and his dark skin goes red when Nebula struts by, toast hanging out of her mouth and arms laden with chocolate cereals, marshmallows, three types of cheeses and oddly, cucumbers. 

“She’s not really naked, you know, what with all they cyborg stuff,” Bucky says once, from behind his book.

“That’s still her skin,” Rhodey says. He tilts his head thoughtfully. “You think the smoothness is an alien thing or an enhancement thing?”

Bucky isn’t gentle when he hauls him out, and Rhodey only half apologizes.

\---

Bucky gets a chance to fix Nebula’s hip entirely on accident. Nightmares are a thing in the haunted tower, and screams echo like fucking howling hyenas and he’s chasing a sound only half aware when he slams into her room.

She’s writhing, glowing, about to bring the place down and Bucky _tackles_ her, pins her wrist to the bed and drives his knees into her hips, and he can hear the metal snap but that’s not his focus. 

“Nebula. Nebs. NEBULA.” He screams in her face and she startles awake snarling and foaming at the mouth, wrestling against him.

She’s strong. Damn strong and she bends him until he has to give, or risk a spinal injury himself. When she finally realizes who he is, she doesn’t let go of his wrist, but her grip loosens and blood rushes into his flesh fingers.

He glances at the bent metal of his other wrist, then gives her a flat look. “You’re fixin’ that.”

She just makes a face at him and carefully climbs off, letting him sit up.

She’s wearing a t-shirt that might’ve been Tony’s or Wanda’s or anyone else's. “It doesn’t bother you, to wear their things?”

“Does it bother you that I do?” She asks. Again there’s a rough edge to her voice, but no malice. Only the same hesitant curiosity he thinks was developed through years of metal implants and skin grafts.

He has to think about it though, her question. “No. No, it’s just, don’t you want your own stuff?”

“I don’t have earth cash,” she says like he’s a dunce for not knowing this. “Besides, it’ll just rot here anyway.”

She isn’t wrong, and the shirt looks good on her, especially accompanied by nothing else.

Bucky rolls to the left side of the bed, and starts tugging the covers down, and Nebula grips his fleshy shoulder too tight and asks, low and quiet in his ear, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Bucky pries her fingers off. “I’m tired. My rooms on the opposite side of this damn construct, and honestly, I think we’d both sleep better if we weren’t alone with our monsters.”

Nebula is quiet, but she does slink down under the covers, her back pressed against his. She’s cold, but he thinks that’s an alien thing and it’s honesty kind of nice.

They sleep, and neither of them dream, and they don’t discuss it in the morning.

\---

Bucky kisses Nebula on a metal work bench, rhubarb wine and whiskey coating their tongues. They’ve been playing with his arm and her… everything, plucking wires and bending plates and trying their damndest to put the pieces of them back together.

They’ve been using scraps and left over s to make pretty chimes and fancy wall art that mostly reflects their sharp edges, but sells pretty on the internet to people who don’t understand.

It’d mostly worked, putting themselves back together and putting the broken parts in the box labels “pretty shit.” Right up until they got too drunk to be useful and she was just showing how _flexible_ her parts made her. She could literally fold herself into a box, really, and it was as disgusting as it was beautiful and erotic, and when she’s sitting in front of him again, almost humanoide and black eyes gleaming with something like mirth and a phantom light he’s never found, he leaned forward.

Her lips are cold, fleshy, and sweet, and she doesn’t murder him for it.

“Why?” She asks.

“Cause your edges fit mine,” he answers, and she nods like it makes sense, and then she settles into his lap like she’s always fit there and carefully places hands that are just skin covered steel around his neck and kisses like she’s tasting life for the first time.

She bites, sharp, and he licks the wounds himself, grinning at her like _she’s_ the prey. But there’s a carefulness about her, an uncertainty that keeps his hands on her waist, fingers finding where metal and wire and flesh all join together.

“You kiss a lot of broken vets?” He asks her, when they’re breathless, foreheads pressed together and eyes shut. 

“You kiss a lot of virgin cyborg aliens?” She asks. It’s not an accusation, not quite, but Bucky still feels it right there where his heart should be, and he pulls back to look at her.

She won’t look at him, so he fits his hands beneath her chin and gently presses until she looks at him.

“Virgin?” He asks. It doesn’t matter, or change things, but he needs to know.

“You’d be surprised how little kissing matters in seduction and,” she swallows. “I got what I needed and a kiss was never part of it.”

Bucky vows to show her just why kissing is _so_ important.

\---

Steve dies.

He does it on a Thursday and the world mourns, a little less than it did for Tony, but his funeral is a helluva lot more public and Bucky can’t go.

He just can’t.

Nebula hides with him in a dark tower, wearing _his_ shirt and _his_ boxers. She strokes his hair, braids it.

“Do you miss your own?” He asks her.

“I don’t remember having any,” she says, pulling tight.

“Do you want hair?” He asks, desperate to forget why the guns are sounding.

“Do you think I need it? Would I be prettier with it?” She asks. There’s another question lurking there that Bucky can’t solve, so she asks point blank, “Would you bed me if I had hair like your human girls?”

Bucky tries to turn, but her hands are still tangled in the braid she’s attempting. “You think that’s why I haven’t-”

“Is it not?” She asks, releasing him. 

Bucky grabs her arm and he knows it’s only because she wants to have this conversation that she’s letting him pull her back, turn her towards him.

“Nebs. I’m not real good at a whole lot of things, but I ain’t ever one to force anyone into anything, or make ‘em feel like they have to. And you spent a lot of your life that way, so I’m just trying to make sure you don’t, well,” Bucky bites his lip until he taste metal, “I don’t ever want you to feel like you have to.” 

“And if I want to?” Nebula purrs at him.

Bucky doesn’t have to be asked twice, and he lets her lead the way.

\--- 

The bed is too big and definitely unused, but the sheets are surprisingly fresh and Bucky is surprised that Nebula can blush. He whistles, because _damn_.

She sneers at him, but he pulls at her shirt, and the boxers she’s borrowed and lets her yank his own cloths off.

Nebula is mostly the thing that Thanos built. But there are still parts of her, her skin, her smile, her breast, her… that he never touched. He thinks he’s touched her heart, even if parts of it are wire and he’s definitely touched her personality, volatile and adorable. But the rest.  

Bucky touches, careful, gentle fingers ghosting over blue skin, faintly smiling when she gets goosebumps. When purple nipples harden and her fingers twitch. He lays her down and kisses her, and she taste like confectioner sugar and whiskey, and he drags his fingers down her sides.

She shivers and looks at him. “It’ll never not be odd how different your hands feel, and yet how similar.”

It’s almost a compliment, and he’ll take it. He trails kisses down her jaw, down her neck. Across her collarbone and her breast and one day he’ll take time to _really_ focus on those, but he’s on a mission down a half metal belly and over a smooth mound.

Turns out, alien girls are built mostly like human girls, and Bucky’s never been real good with words, but he’s _always_ been good with his tongue. Nebula fist her hands in the sheets the first time he licks at her, gentle and teasing, knees spread apart.

He wants to see her writhe, wants to hear her, and he lets her know, flesh fingers gently entering her while his tongue moves lazily. He gets a quiet gasp, a hand tangled in his hair almost too tight, and then he moves his fingers, sucks a little, twist and turns and doesn’t let up until her hips shift off the bed and she _moans_.

Bucky works until his jaw aches, until there’s a puddle between her thighs, until she’s pulling him by his shoulders and saying, “I _want_.”

He gives. He enters her slowly because he’s not sure how exactly this’ll work for them, but he enters easily and it’s not quite the same warm, slick heat he’s had before. She’s a little warmer, a little less smooth, but it feels like heaven and when he moves, he quickly realizes _gentle_ doesn’t have a place between them right now.

Nebula hooks her legs around him, ankles digging into his thighs and her nails are going to leave scars on his back, but when he shoves, and she lifts off the bed and her skin practically glows…

She’s just as much in control as he is and they don’t quite fight, don’t quite dance for control, but they find it all the same.

He comes first, if only because she’d come on his tongue, and then she does, and she’s _loud._

If Peter and Harley are hiding out here, they definitely know what’s up.

Bucky collapses beside her, licking sweat from her shoulder, surprised it’s there, surprised it’s almost pleasant on his tongue, and she turns towards him, ignoring the mess.

“You fit well,” she says quietly. Almost in awe.

“Guess our edges are broken together,” he tells her, finger trailing across the metal on her cheek. He can’t stop touching her, doesn’t want to.

They fall asleep after a quick shower, in her bed, wrapped in his blanket, and they dream, but it’s not bad.

\---

Nebula isn’t exactly nicer after. She’s still all snarls and too tight grips and stealing all the goddamned food.

Bucky still mostly grunts and he doesn’t shave unless he’s made too and he’s still a little bitter about the empty tower.

But they fit together, weirdly, brokenly, gently, _perfectly._

Nebula admits she’s not sure if they’re compatible reproductively. She says it with shame, admits she doesn’t even know if she still has those parts or if they were lost throughout the years.

“Do you want kids, Nebula?” Bucky asks gently.

“I want to give you want you want,” she says in a moment of rare, unguarded honesty. “But I would also like a child, yes.”

“Then we’ll adopt one. Take an orphan in.  And if it turns out you _can_ have a kid and I _can_ be the father, we’ll have a couple more.”

She kisses him, vicious but excited, and he takes her on the kitchen table.

Rhodey walks in, sighs loudly and leaves, and Bucky’s not even sorry because this is basically their place now.

Pepper never kicked them out, and they’re going to raise their odd little family in this strange new world living in a tower haunted by heroes both living and dead, telling them stories about how broken worlds rebuild and jagged edges sometimes find matches in unlikely places. People.

Nebula’s left arm comes unhinged when they’re holding each other later, and she ducks her head in annoyed embarrassment and he leads her to the lab. “We’ll figure this out. Like we have before. Like we will everything else.”

She doesn’t answer, but she does slip her cold hand into his warm one, and he thinks that’s the same as her saying “I love you” and he’s pretty okay with that. 

\---

He visits Steve’s grave eventually.

“She didn’t hurt me, you know,” he tells the stone. He shifts the blue skinned toddler in his metal arm, staring at the shock of emerald hair. “Not like you thought anyway. But I do like it a little rough and I think we’ve both always known that. She’s good for me, and me for her.”

She’s standing back, a little red headed runt’s head against her hip, poking her rounded belly, and Bucky almost, _almost_ wishes Steve were here to see their odd little family.

“Her edges are all broken, yeah, but tell me someone who’s aren’t these days?” And he’s not bitter about it anymore. ‘Cause they’ve got a tower, and a family, and a business built on rough edges that don’t need smoothing, just fitting together.

Still, he leaves a little stained-glass windchime shaped like a shield over the grave. Goodbyes are stupid, but he figures it’s a half decent parting gift anyway.


End file.
